Clothing Meshes and Templates

Ok I have been steadly working on getting my New clothing in place and no matter what I do the arms vary from avatar to avatar based on the individual size of the avatar torso arm ETC.

So My question to Linden labs is this based on several questions actually.

#1 In the Future will there be a way to export based on the size and shape of the avatar being used a "Mesh" template that corresponds to that particular avatar. This would be helpful because I have noted on a small male frame a "Vest" will line up if you make it correctly on the template but if you have a huge torso the vest distorts emensly.

#2 Tighter Mesh for the New Dresses or the ablility to have at least a 4 layer Dress that blows in the wind like the new 1.2 allows.

#3 Jackets a Single Mesh that combines both top and bottom templates into one mesh that can be applied to the avatar.
Reason. A) all avatars wouldnt have jackets that taper to the waist. B) also with this "Jacket" Mesh allow for a hooded Cloak for like sweat suits and Cloaks. In addition to a "Jacket" mesh a Hooded Cape Mesh.

#4 Chest High Drapped Gown attachments that instead of falling into the creavace of the breasts on a female avatar would stretch across them like RL clothing. Noted if u can make the dress clothing like you did you can do a solid robust drape across a females breasts. This would allow for mini Halter dress tops and negligie without using a HARD prim to creat a cone that won't move fluidly.

#5 along with #4 the same style of Shirt for Female Avatars. Currently any t-shirt with a Texture of anything on it gets lost in the cleavage.

I know you(Linden Labs) are using the Poser to create the clothing and the template Meshes that we currently have. By adding the above mentioned types of clothing to the inventory or ability to make varied clothing and attire would vastly expand the creative ability of individuals,Tailors and Seamstresses alone within SL.

Anyone else see any Merrit to what I have mentioned here please speak up.

Sincerely, Shadow Weaver

More clothing meshing would be good, would allow for many extra features and effects to be applied to how avatars look. It would be especialy cool if the jacket mesh would also blow in the wind so you could have a better trench coat and/or cape effect

Yeah, I wish this was possible too. I read somewhere, I think in the "how to use these templates" document for the clothing templates, that the reason that jackets are split into two templates is because the avatars are physically split at the wait and thus, anything below the waist is going to be applied separately from the upper area because of the way avs are built.

What I think could solve the problem is if, say, the jacket went *over* the skirt rather than under it. That would allow for much more functionality in clothing design, imho.

Zana

Yes yes and yes on a shirt that doesn't get lost between the breasts. Poser does this too, and it drives me nuts. Hey folks, no woman's shirt goes /between/ the breasts unless it has built-in underwire and is skintight. As much as some of the guys out there would like this, it just isn't so

I would also love a skirt that doesn't make a huge bubble butt unless you change your body, and doesn't distort the texture like spandex. But, baby steps. I know from working in Poser for years that some things that might seem simple are a real challege in 3D.

Improved texture mapping would be wonderful. I love working with stripes and, well...yeah. Pain in the butt and ten versions later. It's currently very difficult to line up anything front to back. So my designs find ways around it.

Okay Shad, not to burst your bubble or anything, hehe, but I'll go through your points and explain why they're unlikely

The way UV mapping works on the avs is one size fits all. The texture mapping is baked into the polygons of the avatar mesh, and there is only one avatar mesh. The polygons get moved around relative to the skeletal system that animates the avatar as you move the sliders (or change gender) but each polygon still gets the exact same bit of texture regardless of the avatar shape. Remember that the more you adjust the av towards the extremes (especially towards larger fatter avs) the more each polygon has to stretch, which means the more the bit of texture on that polygon is going to stretch.To do what you suggest here would mean having UV mapping that's not baked, meaning the bit of texture on each polygon would change depending on how the av was adjusted... the end result of that would be that trying to make clothing would be so impossibly frustrating that no one would do it.



The reason the skirts are loose is because they're deformed by the same underlying skeletal system as the rest of the av. They have to keep a bit of distance between the polygons of the skirt and the polygons of the legs so they don't intersect. If you adjust the fit of a skirt really tight you'll notice the legs poke through it when you walk. I'm not saying that it couldn't be improved, but that there's a reason why it is the way it is. More time could have been spent weighting the vertices of the skirt so it deformed a bit more gracefully though. Currently all the stretch in the skirt when the legs are spread is along the center row of polygons making for some nasty texture stretch. It should have been averaged across 3 rows at least.



Jackets use the exact same UV mapping as tops, pants, and the avatar skin itself. The only way they could make jackets overhang the waist and use a single texture would be to add a seperate mesh object for jackets as they did with skirts. It would need to be just as loose as the skirts are. It would also add a considerable amount of additional polygons to the avatar (far more than the skirt mesh adds) because it would need to be capable of all the deformations that the upper body mesh is. The cost of that in framerate lag probably wouldn't be worth it. If they kept it the way it is but used different UV mapping for the jacket, it would require the av vertices to store more than one set of UV coordinates which the engine most likely isn't capable of currently. The point being this wouldn't simply be a cosmetic change, but would require a rewrite of part of the graphics engine core.



This one is basically the same answer as the jacket issue. There's only two ways it could be done... either there would need to be an additional mesh added for this like the skirt mesh, or it would have to work the way that the cuff of sleeves and pant legs do currently (by creating a 90 degree angle at the edge of the corresponding chest polygons between the breasts. It would not be hollow and would probably look worse than it does now.



Same as above.




How do you know they're using Poser? I'd find that extremely unlikely. The poser mesh is a lot more complex than the SL avatar mesh so any kind of direct export would be useless. Also the only similarity between the way the UV mapping is in Poser and SL is that they both use planar mapping. Poser uses a single texture with different sections of the body laid out on one sheet. SL splits it into three different planar maps (4 if you count the skirt). Poser isn't a serious development tool. You can't edit the UV mapping in Poser at all. It's aimed at hobbiests and its export capabilities are extremely limited. It's much more likely that the avatars were built and mapped in something like 3ds Max.

I'd say to be very careful what you wish for. I noticed in another thread that you're just now getting around to fixing the clothing that was made unwearable the last time they changed the avatar texture mapping. Any serious changes would invalidate most or all of the current clothing in the game. I have close to 100 items right now and I would scream bloody murder if I had to redo them all. The "improved" texture mapping in the crotch area actually made it MUCH worse than it was before, making doing panties, bikinis, and short shorts very difficult and severely limiting the kind of cuts you can do to avoid the awful texture smearing on the inner thigh.

There's really only one major change I'd like to see done to the avatar mapping, and that would be to fix the crotch area again. But this time DO IT RIGHT and slide the texture coordinates on the inside of the leg UP so that the inner thigh polygons get more than a single pixel of texture on them. This would mean having to redo everything that needed to be redone for 1.1, but most pants and shorts would probably still be wearable.

At this stage in the game they can't really make any major changes to the way the avs are mapped because it would invalidate too much hard work by too many clothing designers and it would take a long time for the dust to settle.

Chip,

That was a great answer, just wanted to tell you. I actually learned something today .

Zana

Thanks Zana

I stand corrected on the jacket, Shadow. Xenon posted in another thread that they might experiment with adding a jacket mesh to the avs at some point, so there's hope for that one!

Heh, yeah, there's always hope, Chip!

Your answers to Shadow's questions were fairly accurate, but I'll add a couple more points to consider.

There is only one avatar mesh and all the avatar's textures are layered over this one polygonal model. Each of the body adjustment sliders deforms that one mesh is a particular way to give you the wide variation in avatars you can create in SL. The deformation for, say, the big belly slider, is data derived from a seperate version of the base mesh with the polygons around the belly sculpted to look distended. There are hundreds of these modified models (called morph targets) to drive all the sliders.

We use Maya for all the modeling and UV texture mapping. The rumors about Poser probably stem from the fact that Poser was used to create some of the character animation in SL.

A couple versions ago we were able to export distinct UV maps for each of those morph targets in an effort to reduce texture stretching on certain areas. It actually does work, as people familiar with the beta may remember just how poorly text on a T-shirt read on most avatars' chests. That's not to say there are no longer areas where texture stretching occurs (*cough* crotch *cough*), and we will continue to try to improve the areas that we can. But as you noted, any gross changes we could make at this point would invalidate many, many existing textures that many people have spent much time perfecting. We must very carefully weigh that point against any change to the avatar that is technically possible.


The texture stretch between the legs of the skirt is simply a limitation of the current system we use to bind the mesh to the skeleton. While we can blend vertex weights between joints that are connected, we can't blend *across* the joint heirarchy. Since the skirt is bound to the legs, any one vertex on the skirt mesh can only be associated with one leg's bones or the other, not both. The mesh between the legs, no matter how many polys we devote to it, will unfortunately stretch unnaturally. Consider the skirt mesh simply as an alternative to using rigid primitives for skirts, and a baby step towards more realistic clothing (culminating with SL v. 3.6 featuring physical cloth simulation for each of the 3000 avatars visible on your 20 Ghz PC)


-Xenon

Thanks for all the info Xenon! The distinct UV's for morph targets helped immensely. I remember what it was like trying to do shirts in Beta! I wondered what you'd changed to accomplish it but that never popped into my head. I figured you'd just edited the UV's to a happier medium.

The skirt texture stretch doesn't bother me too much, and not being able to blend weights between different branches of the hierarchy is a bummer. That would be really great if it got built into the engine some day. Pre-skirts there was never a reason for it though.

Is there any chance that the crotch area will get some attention again at some point? The top row of polys on the legs and inner thighs seems to get only 1 pixel of coverage so there's a large smear zone that's tough to work around. We're kinda limited to french cut or boxers. Anything in between can't avoid the problem area. If those polys could get about 5-10 pixels it would make life a lot easier.

Out of curiosity... how long did it take to model all the morph targets? And how many times did you have to redo the base mesh before you could get it sculpted into all the necessary targets? The quality of the av's in SL is pretty spectacular (even if I bitch about the uv's sometimes, hehe). It must have been a massive modeling job.

Would it be possible to add another slider and morph target for "chest fill", filling in the area between the breasts? Ideally, this morph would only be active when the av is wearing a shirt or jacket, so you don't need to switch body shapes when undressing or changing into a swimsuit.

Chip,


Yeah, another attempt at the crotch area mapping is certainly in the cards sooner rather than later. As you can probably tell from the downloadable UV maps/texture templates there is just not enough texture space devoted to that area. Any more pixels added to the crotch will need to be taken away from a neighboring area which will increase stretching in those areas, so the whole process becomes a juggling game of compromises. The current mapping actually did improve texture stretching for some specific styles of underwear, but at the expense of others.

The visibility of the stretching is compounded by the fact that the crotch experiences some of the most convoluted mesh distortion on the entire avatar (it being the junction of the legs and pelvis) and the fact that there is apparently a strong demand for skimpier apparel from discerning fashionistas who must look good no matter what strange pose the avatar is in. These issues were certainly underappreciated 2 years ago when the original avatar mesh was conceived.

The time to create the avatar mesh and related morph targets is hard to quantify. Basically, in that 2 year time frame we went from "Primitar" (alpha avatar built entirely of primitives) to what is now the current state. Several versions of the original base avatar were created early on, but once morph target creation began it essentially "locked" the mesh. And while creating hundreds of morph targets was/is a major part of the avatar development, certain other aspects of the avatar were even more time intensive. For example, the system that allows sliders to control texture parameters, such as shirt sleeve length, required a lot of development time to perfect, and wasn't even conceived until after the base mesh had been locked down.

Morph targets and their associated sliders are created to add requested features or solve particular problems, as long as those additions don't break an existing feature. In fact, Carnilido's request is an interesting idea that *may* be possible. Sometimes even the most simple addition can have ugly side effects in a system as intertwined as our avatar's, so... no promises, other than to seriously consider it!

-Xenon

I think a "butt cleavage" slider might be something to check out as well.

OMG! It's a nightmare on crack street!!

:: falls over laughing ::

Thanks again Xenon.

Cool! I was going to suggest this recently, if you mean exporting actual 3D models of AVs so you can texture them out of world. The reason I didn't suggest it is that you'd really need some kind of "offline viewer" anyway, because I don't think any of the modeling programs out there would be able to display the texture the same as it'd look in game. (It's quite impossible, I think.) Without a viewer of some sort I can't see this as being useful.

What would be ALOT better IMO is a temporary upload feature, that costs nothing to upload a texture but lets the texture exist for 5-10 minutes so we can "preview".

Thank you Xenon and I appreciate the correction on the Poser aspect. I had a telephonic conversation about a month and a half ago in reference to poser with LL and I guess thats where my missinterpretation of the "using Poser" came into play. My apologies on that aspect.

However, in all laymens terms so to speak does your explination mean that there is no possibilty of the additional clothing styles I mentioned previously Like a full length coat or a Cloak.

Im only on for a short period on the message boards during the week and I truly do appreciate your Responce in this matter Xenon. If you could help clear that one question up a little for some of us Id greatly appreciate it. Technical aspects of 3d modeling are not totaly my forte but again I am learning and mostly self taught due to reading and asking pertinet questions from time to time.

Again thank you for responding to this it keeps showing me the excelent quality of service LL continues to produce for its clients.

Shadow

Hi Shadow,

Actually, one idea we're throwing around here is adding another mesh object for a jacket, similar to the new skirt mesh. It might even be possible to match the jacket mesh to the skirt mesh to create convincing overcoats and cloaks. So, there is certainly a chance you'll get at least a few of the things you want.

-Xenon

Will this Jacket Mesh possibly have a Hood on it one that with a slider would allow it to be up or down??